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By Barbara Crossette
NEW YORK, Oct 3 2019 (IPS)

For the first time since a new development agenda was adopted in 2015 to make the world a better place for everyone, government leaders assembled at the United Nations in late September to take stock of progress. The verdict of this summit was not good.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the centerpiece of Agenda 2030, were on life support in the eyes of many experts in and around the high-level UN sessions. Some goals were in danger of reversing earlier gains.

A new strategy, however, devised by a team of international development experts, was presented for governments to consider to turn around the bad news about the faltering goals.

“Our goal to end extreme poverty by 2030 is being jeopardized as we struggle to respond to entrenched deprivation, violent conflicts and vulnerabilities to natural disasters,” Secretary-General António Guterres wrote when the latest data on the SDGs were released in July 2019.

The numbers provided background to the meeting of world leaders in New York during the opening of the 74th General Assembly.

“Global hunger is on the rise, and at least half of the world’s population lacks essential health services,” Guterres wrote. “More than half of the world’s children do not meet standards in reading and mathematics; only 28 per cent of persons with severe disabilities received cash benefits; and women in all parts of the world continue to face structural disadvantages and discrimination.

“It is abundantly clear that a much deeper, faster and more ambitious response is needed to unleash the social and economic transformation needed to achieve our 2030 goals.”

Guterres reiterated his message of urgency when he opened the high-level review of the SDGs on Sept. 24. Speaking the next day, Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed was more optimistic about what she saw as “the boundless potential of humanity to create a better future for all.” Mohammed, however, who had shepherded the goals into their final form in 2015, acknowledged that progress was off track.

The data report in July revealed that despite some gains, many millions of people among the world’s 7.7 billion people were living in shocking conditions. That included the 785 million people without basic drinking water services and three billion people still lacking clean cooking fuels, contributing to poor health.

Fewer than half of the people in the world had access to safe sanitation, and 673 million were forced to defecate in the open, according to the latest statistics from 2017.

“Achieving universal access to even basic sanitation services by 2030 will require a doubling of the current annual rate of progress,” the secretary-general has noted.

Separately, a UN special rapporteur on human rights, Urmila Bhoola, reported that more than 40 million people are enslaved worldwide, a quarter of them children, and that the numbers are expected to rise.

More than 60 percent of those in forced labor work in the private sector, with women and girls disproportionately affected. Almost all of them — 98 percent — have experienced sexual violence, said Bhoola, who reports on contemporary forms of slavery.

Against this dismal panorama, a new report emerged with talking points for the gathering of government officials on the SDGs during the UN General Assembly session this month. The report challenged current assumptions and thinking on the planning and implementing of development projects.

Titled “The Future Is Now: Science for Achieving Sustainable Development,” the report does not attempt to rewrite the 17 development goals or their mind-numbing 169 targets.

Instead, the authors, a team of 15 experts in social and natural sciences assembled in 2016 from developing and industrial countries, concluded that goals could be interconnected or clustered to promote synergistic exchanges for greater effectiveness and should not be isolated in 17 silos.

Leading the group as co-chairs were Peter Messerli, director of the Center for Development and Environment at the University of Bern in Switzerland, and Endah Murniningtyas, a former deputy planning minister of Indonesia. The UN’s Department of Social and Economic Affairs published their report. (For a global projection of how far off the targets are, see https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/gsdr2019 Table 1-1.)

The scientists recommended six areas that could be collaboratively transformative: issues of human well-being and abilities; sustainable and just economies; sustainable food systems and healthy nutrition; energy decarbonization; urban and peri-urban development; and the global environmental commons. They named four “levers” that could be used to spur action: governance, economy and finance, individual and collective action and science and technology.

The underlying importance of science, including the professional collection of credible data, is a theme that runs throughout the report. Governance is also given prominence in both identifying and implementing the goals.

In “The Future Is Now” report, the scientists appeared to conclude that new thinking was needed.

“Every country and region should design and rapidly implement integrated pathways to sustainable development that correspond to their specific needs and priorities, and contribute also to the necessary global transformation,” the authors said.

Using one issue, childhood nutrition, the authors described how their report’s “entry points” can be linked: “For instance, changes in food habits towards more healthy diets may result from individual and collective action, which is informed by scientific knowledge that can directly influence choices made by families, while supporting governance initiatives such as mandatory food labelling and schools limiting students access to sugary drinks.”

The emphasis on collaboration and interaction within and among countries suggests that the current lack of such links reflects not only failures of governance but also the impetus and structure of the SDGs.

David Malone is the rector of the United Nations University in Tokyo and a former president of Canada’s International Development Research Center. He was asked by PassBlue why the SDGs have faltered while the Millennium Development Goals that preceded them were more successful.

“The Millennium Development Goals arose from a desire of the developing continents to refocus the UN on development issues after the decade of the 1990s had focused the UN very much on peace and security,” according to Malone, who has been Canada’s ambassador to India, Nepal and Bhutan as well as deputy chief of Canada’s UN mission.

“They offered the considerable benefit of being simple and clear, few in number (8) with few accompanying targets and indicators,” he said in an email response. “They were not developed by member states, but rather in the office of Secretary-General Kofi Annan several months after the Millennium Summit”.

“That they were mostly attained owes a great deal to the manageable nature of the package, so to speak. But it probably owes more to a very significant growth spurt in both Asia and Africa and to a strong focus on social development in Latin America between the years 2000 and 2015.”

“The members states of the UN very much wished to develop the successor platform, the SDGs, themselves,” he added. “The result was a fairly political approach including compromises that were essentially additive — each country’s or region’s pet priority being somehow accommodated — with little attention to the ability of many governments to implement complex schemes developed internationally”.

The SDGs involve 17 goals, 169 targets and over 200 indicators by which those targets can be measured.

“After their adoption, it became clear within two years that many governments, particularly those with limited administrative capacity, while celebrating the goals, were not actually using them in planning or budgeting national priorities. The UN Secretariat has signaled several times now that on current global economic growth trends, many of the SDGs are unlikely to be attained. Politics nationally, regionally and globally are hardly cooperating either. And SDG success is very much hostage to both sets of factors.”

A significant difference between the SDGs and the MDGs is that the former should apply to every nation, not only developing countries, and that all governments are expected to declare their aspirations, plan their appropriate policies and track their national progress.

That has not happened in numerous places. One of the most glaring examples is the United States. A State Department website on the topic qualifies it by an advisory that it “is a work in progress” and mostly devoid of US-specific information or commitment.

Among other advanced economies, the Europeans have done much better, with a number of related websites, beginning with an overview of regional policies.

On Sept 24 at the UN, a panel of European Union and developing-country partners in the 79-member African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States announced a new commitment to the 2030 Agenda, backed by about $32 million, from the Europeans.

Canada, with numerous websites introduced by a comprehensive policy statement, is also active, as is Japan. It has multiple online sites, including one following the work of its national task forces carrying out the sustainable goals.

The post Salvaging the SDGs: New Thinking to Spur Action Takes Shape appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Barbara Crossette is the senior consulting editor and writer for PassBlue and the United Nations correspondent for The Nation. She is also a board member of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The post Salvaging the SDGs: New Thinking to Spur Action Takes Shape appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM / ROME, Oct 2 2019 (IPS)

In a 1974 article, Woody Allen poked fun at biblical stories presenting ludicrous paraphrases of The Book of Job, Abraham´s intended sacrifice of his son Isaac, as well as The Book of Proverbs. One of Allen´s invented proverbs was: “The wicked at heart probably know something”, thus implementing that the “pure of heart”, i.e. credulous people, know nothing. 1 Giuliano da Empoli, a well-known Italian politician, culture personality and founder of the influential think tank Volta makes use of this Woody Allen quote to introduce his book Gli ingegneri del caos,2 The Engineers of Chaos. da Empoli describes that everywhere in Europe and elsewhere the rise of populism takes the form of a frenzied spectacle, overthrowing established rules and political decency by converting them into their opposite. In the eyes of their supporters, unscrupulous and power-hungry demagogues are currently transforming what previously was considered as political incorrectness and abuse into a desirable quality of fearless truth-seekers. To their followers, the inexperience of populists becomes proof of their unattachment to corrupt, elitist circles, while their incompetence is considered to be a sign of authenticity. The tensions such populist politicians create at national and international levels are by disenfranchised citizens assumed to be manifestations of their independence, their ability to think “out of the box” and a capacity to express the inner feelings of an otherwise silent majority.

da Empoli assumes that populism, like Communism once was, now has become a spectre not only haunting Europe but the entire world. However, da Empoli does not consider current populism to be just an expression of spontaneous dissatisfaction. He points to the fact that much of the emotions stirred up in support of populist parties have been devised by behavioral sciences and smart marketing, something he calls “quantum politics”. Techniques that originally were developed to sell goods and services are to a much greater extent than before now being used in politics. In what da Empoli denominates as the Selfie-era unscrupulous politicians are exploiting people’s need to manifest their personality in social media, allowing experts to apply sophisticated technologies to record and manipulate people’s thoughts and behavior. It is such experts da Empoli labels as “engineers of chaos”, spin doctors, ideologues, scientists and data experts without whose assistance populist leaders never would have come to power.

da Empoli introduces his readers to stories about a small, web-marketing company that created a powerful Italian political party, to web technicians who ensured the Brexit victory, to communication experts transforming the political landscape of Eastern Europe, and to the American right-wing theoreticians who propelled Donald Trump to the White House. An almost carnivalesque cavalcade of colourful characters, many of them almost unknown to the general public. A small group of people is by da Empoli accused of changing the rules of the political game and the face of our societies. He uses the Italian Five Star Movement as a conspicuous example of how a “non-organization” with a “non-leader” and without any statues or charter and no ideology in a short time could become one of Italy´s most powerful political parties.

Gianroberto Casaleggio (1954-2016) was an Italian entrepreneur and politician, who together with the comedian Beppe Grillo founded the political party Movimento 5 Stelle, Five Star Movement. Casaleggio is generally considered to be the brain, the guru, behind this movement. He created its network strategies and edited a highly influential blog written by Beppe Grillo. By the beginning of his political career, Casaleggio had been managing director of Webegg, a “multidisciplinary group for consulting companies and public administration on the net [with an] objective to position companies on the network.” 3 In 2004, he founded Casaleggio Associati, with customers such as Hewlett Packard, Philip Morris, JPMorgan Chase, PepsiCo, Marriott, IBM, and Best Western. In 2005, Casaleggio began to publish Beppe Grillo’s books and the following year Casaleggio Associati carried out comprehensive studies of the role and importance of e-commerce while publishing books and videos about the effectiveness of the web when it comes to convincing people to buy anything and even change their views and opinions. In June 2012, Casaleggio had a private meeting with Michael Slaby, Chief Integration and Innovation Officer for Obama’s electoral campaign, explaining his theories about how the internet could be an essential tool for “direct democracy”. Casaleggio implemented his ideas in support of Beppe Grillo and his populist party. He is now credited with designing a first-rate entrepreneur plan adapting the internet to market strategies influencing political choices of network users. One of Casaleggio´s many controversial methods was the use of ”fake news” and unsubstantiated “facts”.

Casaleggio Associati´s innovative use of the internet for political purposes was only one of many such endeavors. The British company Cambridge Analytica, established in 2013, was until its bankruptcy in May 2018 involved in several political elections, not the least Donald Trump´s presidential campaign. Trump´s infamous advisor Steve Bannon served for a while as Cambridge Analytica’s vice-president. In 2014, British behavioral scientists presented on Facebook a “personality test” called This is Your Digital Life. About 270,000 people activated this Facebook application and unaware provided Cambridge Analytica with their personal data. Methods developed from these data were then used all over the world, sold to political parties and thus allowed to influence electoral processes in countries like Mexico, Malaysia, Brazil, Kenya, and India. Cambridge Analytica was also contracted by campaign managers who tried to convince people to leave the European Union. Ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, Cambridge Analytica was hired by Donald Trump’s campaign to advise on how to influence voters by using the company´s comprehensive data bank and efficient, manipulative methods.

In March 2018, former Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie went out in the media with information on how the company had acted to influence elections. The same year, a video was released in which Cambridge Analytica´s CEO, Alexander Nix, was captured by a hidden camera while revealing how his company had been involved in elections in about 200 countries and how it had laid traps for politicians by luring them into compromising situations. The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom authorized a house search to examine Cambridge Analytica’s servers and could thus prove that accusations leveled against the company had actually been based on unequivocal facts.

In a Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, Brittany Kaiser, a former senior director of Cambridge Analytica tells her story; how she as an idealistic intern had been working on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and after that obtained a Ph.D. in international law and diplomacy at the Middlesex University in London. In 2014, Kaiser was hired by Cambridge Analytica to ”help commercial and political clients use data insights to solve problems and achieve campaign goals.”

In April 2018, Kaiser was summoned to give evidence to a British Government committee investigating Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. She confirmed that Cambridge Analytica had indeed used Facebook data to influence elections around the world, admitting that the true scope of the abuse was likely to be “much greater” than the number of 87 million accounts that had been suggested by other whistleblowers, declaring:

Now I’m blowing the whistle on the whole industry. The problem starts with the Silicon Valley tech platforms, which track our every movement and make us easy to target.

da Empoli is probably right when he states that it is not enough to draw attention to similarities between the catastrophic rise of xenophobic and fascist parties of pre-war Europe and today´s populist parties, what we now are witnessing is partly an entirely new phenomenon fuelled by innovative and manipulative technocrats who sell their expertise to unscrupulous politicians. The wicked at heart probably know something that the pure of the heart do not comprehend.

However, are companies based on technical expertise on mass communication evil entities? I doubt if they can be characterized like that. More likely they are like most other big companies trying to find answers to their clients’ demands while expanding and increasing profits for their shareholders. They are part of a complex system, which is extremely difficult to scrutinize and regulate. For example, Wall Street’s collapse in 2008 was not the result of some vicious plan, but of thousands of actors’ self-serving behaviour within an unregulated financial market. The mass manipulation staged by communication companies like Casaleggio Associati and Cambridge Analytica is perhaps just the beginning of a Brave New World where the financial market controls politics to an even greater extent than today. A liquid world described by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman – an existence dominated by a diffuse fear, fragmented and non-anchored, freely floating around without any clear cause or destination, where threats are perceived everywhere, without being clearly defined.4

1 Allen, Woody (1974), “The Scrolls,” The New Republic, August 31.
2 da Empoli, Giuliano (2019) Gli Ingegneri del caos: Teoria e tecnica dell´Internazionale populista. Venezia: Marsilio.
3 Orsatti, Pietro (2010) ”Grillo e il suo spin doctor: La Cassaleggio Associati,” MicroMega No. 5, September 30.
4 Bauman, Zymunt (2007) Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press

Jan Lundius holds a PhD. on History of Religion from Lund University and has served as a development expert, researcher and advisor at SIDA, UNESCO, FAO and other international organisations.

The post How Media Technocrats Manipulate Public Opinion appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: UN Environment

By Junjie Zhang
KUNSHAN, Jiangsu, China, Oct 2 2019 (IPS)

In the 2014 China-US joint announcement on climate change, China promised to peak its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions around 2030. Later this commitment was cemented in the Paris Agreement signed in 2016.

However, China’s climate ambition has been shadowed by its dwindling economic growth rate, which declined from 14.23 per cent in 2007 to 6.6 per cent in 2018.

As the world’s largest emitter and second largest economy, China is striving to strike a balance between economic growth and climate mitigation. The climate-economy trade-off has become even more tricky in recent years especially as the China-US relation sours.

On the one hand, the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement shakes the foundation of China’s climate commitment. On the other hand, the deceleration of economic growth, partly thanks to the ongoing trade war between China and the US, constraints China’s capacity to curb its GHG emissions.

China is searching for efficient means to reduce GHG emissions while continuing to grow its economy rapidly. Its climate mitigation efforts are focused on five areas: upgrading industrial structure, cleaning energy mix, improving energy efficiency, reducing non-energy related GHG emissions and increasing carbon sinks.

These policies are generally aligned with China’s overall economic growth strategy that targets developing new industries such as information technology and renewable energy as well as cutting overcapacities in backward industries such as iron and steel.

Junjie Zhang

China’s structural reform

In order to better design and implement its climate policies, China is in the process of streamlining climate regulations through institutional reform. China’s climate regulatory regime went through significant shakeup in 2018.

The most notable change was the shift of the Climate Change Department from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) to the newly established Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE).

The rationale of the reform is to consolidate the regulations of climate change and environmental pollution. Global warming and air pollution originate from many same sources; air pollution control measures — such as improving energy efficiency, switching from coal to renewables and shutting down backward production facilities — will also lead to GHG emission reductions.

Therefore, the co-control of GHGs and air pollutants, instead of targeting individual pollutants, can lower the cost of both climate and environmental regulations.

Air quality has become a top priority for the central government since 2013. The tightening air pollution control policy becomes a significant contributor to China’s GHG emission reductions.

By linking the climate change issue to the air pollution concern, climate policy can also gain more support from local governments since for them air quality has a much higher priority than climate change.

Credit: UN Environment

The reform enables the climate regulator to take advantage of many policy instruments at the MEE. In 2017, the MEE established a nation-wide emission permit system to consolidate fragmented environmental regulations. It is becoming the core regulatory tool for the emissions from stationary sources.

The emission permit system keeps track of facility-level information about production, emission, and pollution control. Although the system only covers environmental pollutants at this moment, it can be easily adapted to include GHG emissions.

Incorporating GHGs in the emission permit system can ensure that GHG emission reductions are measurable, reportable, and verifiable (MRV). In this sense, shifting the GHG regulation from the NDRC to the MEE helps to harmonise climate and environmental management.

China’s reform of climate regime is overall positive. With the pledge to build ‘a community with a shared future for humankind’, China is determined to continue its path of low carbon development.

The institutional reform has the potential to expedite climate change legislation. Without a law of climate change, the NDRC tended to use departmental rules to regulate GHG emissions. Because the NDRC has powerful influence on economic and energy matters, the rules are generally followed by other ministries and local governments.

In comparison, as a newer and weaker ministry, the MEE is more likely to advocate the rule of law for climate governance. The MEE has strengthened its power through environmental legislation. A case in point is the revised Environmental Protection Law promulgated in 2015.

The new law gave the MEE teeth to dramatically strengthen environmental enforcement. Therefore, the MEE would have more incentive to advocate climate legislation than the NDRC. Should this happen, it will bring China’s climate commitment to the next level.

Mainstreaming climate legislation

The ministerial shake-up also re-opens the debate of alternative climate policy instruments. Specifically, whether to use carbon market or carbon tax to regulate GHG emissions is becoming a live topic again. The Climate Change Department in the NDRC era advocated carbon market.

It created seven regional carbon market pilots in 2013; it also announced the establishment of national emission trading scheme in 2017. When MEE took over the climate regulatory power, it also inherited regional and national carbon markets.

Unlike the NDRC, the MEE has no particular reason to stick to carbon market. Carbon tax should be a viable policy option given that China started environmental tax in 2018. It would be convenient to incorporate GHGs in the existing environmental tax code.

Carbon tax has several advantages over carbon market. In general, carbon tax can provide a more certain price signal to emitters. In China’s context, carbon tax requires legislation, which is important to cement China’s long-term climate commitment. In addition, carbon tax can prevent local governments from interfering the implementation of national climate regulations.

As evidenced in the regional pilots, excessive intervention by local governments can lead to the failure of carbon market. Furthermore, carbon tax can leverage the power of the Ministry of Finance (MOF). The MOF is influential in setting key economic policy agenda. Its involvement can strengthen the compliance and enforcement of climate regulations.

However, the reform of climate regulation also comes with some concerns. The major concern is the weakening linkage between climate change and economic issues. Climate change is not a pure emission problem but also a comprehensive economic problem.

As China’s macroeconomic and energy regulator, the NDRC can move forward the climate agenda by including it in industrial, investment, and energy policies. In comparison, the environmental ministry has much less capacity to influence the national agenda of economic development and energy transition. It will be challenging for the MEE to coordinate various ministries that have more power than the environmental ministry.

A related concern is whether the MEE can tackle the economic and financial challenges associated with the regional and national carbon markets. The MEE has the capacity to ensure the MRV of GHG emission reductions, which is the foundation of a functional carbon market. However, carbon market is intrinsically connected with the financial market.

The MEE needs to work with other ministries, such as the NDRC and the securities regulator, to make sure that the operation of the emission trading scheme does not create unintended economic and financial consequences.

China’s reform of climate regime is overall positive. With the pledge to build ‘a community with a shared future for humankind’, China is determined to continue its path of low carbon development.

Whether China can further move forward its climate agenda hinges on the determination of the top leader, which is influenced by the economic consequence of climate mitigation and the global climate commitment. The new environmental ministry has the right expertise and resources to design and implement climate policies.

The ‘war against air pollution’ which had been declared in 2013 has demonstrated the MEE’s capacity to tackle the tough challenge of environmental pollution. Once climate change becomes the top item on its agenda, there is no doubt the MEE can support China’s climate ambition.

This article was originally published in International Politics and Society

*Duke Kunshan University is committed to building a world-class liberal arts university that offers a broad range of high-quality, innovative academic programs. It was established as a partnership between Duke University in the United States and China’s Wuhan University.

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Excerpt:

Junjie Zhang is Director of the iMEP Program and Environmental Research Center and Associate Professor of Environmental Economics at Duke Kunshan University*.

The post China Wants to Mainstream Environmental Protection appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Asian Development Bank
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Oct 2 2019 (IPS-Partners)

Bangladesh’s capital has some of the worst traffic in the world. But hope is on the way in the shape of a new mass rapid transit system.

Six MRT lines are planned to open between 2021 and 2035, and ADB has provided a grant to help plan the system. ADB’s next step proposed is a technical assistance loan for a detailed design of Line 5-South.

The post Getting out of a Jam in Dhaka appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A 2009 study found that almost 250,000 children worked in auto repair stores, brick klins, as domestic labourers, and as carpet weavers and sozni embroiderers in Jammu and Kashmir. A new study says financiers in Wall Street, the City of London and other banking centres should play a bigger role in freeing the millions of people who endure slave-like working conditions globally. Credit: Umer Asif/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 2 2019 (IPS)

Financiers in Wall Street, the City of London and other banking centres should play a bigger role in freeing the millions of people who endure slave-like working conditions globally, according to a new study.

A group of experts known as the Financial Sector Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking say that banks and other finance bodies can adopt policies to reduce the 40.3 million men, women and children who are victims of forced labour.

Their 172-page report, Unlocking Potential: A Blueprint for Mobilising Finance Against Slavery and Trafficking, calls for more financial probes into people-smuggling rings and greater support to those freed from slave-like conditions. 

“Slavery and human trafficking are big business, reckoned to generate 150 billion dollars every year over the broken backs, hearts and dreams of people young and old,” said Dutch foreign minister Stef Blok, one of the report’s co-authors.

The report paints a bleak portrait of modern slavery, which sees one in every 185 people globally forced to work in an illicit sector that compares in scale to the trade in illegal drugs and counterfeit goods.

Modern forms of slavery include debt bondage, where workers are forced to toil for free in service of a debt, forced marriage, domestic servitude, and forced labour, in which workers face violence or intimidation.     

Modern-day slaves can be found doing everything from begging to gold-mining, but the biggest sectors in the 150-billion-dollar-a-year global business are housework, manufacturing and construction. A quarter of those involved are children. 

James Cockayne, a co-author of the report and policy analyst at United Nations University, said human trafficking and slavery represented a “tragic market failure” . 

“Modern slavery leaves us all worse off because it treats people as disposable objects rather than full economic and social agents,” said Cockayne. 

“We collectively lose out on a huge amount of potential that is currently locked up.”

Tackling the scourge will be a struggle, says the report. Getting the number of exploited workers down to zero by 2030 will involve releasing 10,000 victims of modern slavery every day for the next 11 years.  

Financial institutions can help to achieve that target by boosting resources for financial probes into people-trafficking rings and lifting the lid on firms that turn a profit through slavery, according to the report’s authors. 

Banks can get better at spotting the illicit cash flows linked to people-smuggling rings, and can cooperate more with other institutions to identify and combat the abuse of some of the world’s most vulnerable people. 

As well as turning people into slaves, trafficking ringleaders have also been known to hijack the financial identities of their victims for money laundering purposes. Once they regain their freedom, some victims also find that they have low credit ratings. 

Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Price for his microfinance scheme and assisted on the commission, says banks should invest more in digital and social finance schemes to make poor people less vulnerable to traffickers.

“Large numbers of people around the world remain unbanked,” said Yunus.

“We must … create social businesses, that is, businesses dedicated to solving problems without seeking monetary returns personally, focusing on reducing, and ultimately eliminating the human trafficking and modern slavery.”

The report was driven by the Liechtenstein Initiative, a public-private partnership that is supported by Barclays, Bank of America, HSBC, Wells Fargo, BMO Financial Group and other well known finance brands.

“The financial sector possesses huge potential to help end modern slavery and human trafficking and to maintain the integrity of the international financial system,” added Blok.

“It can create moral capital markets, and can therefore be a powerful force for good, first and foremost by supporting the victims of these criminal business practices.”

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Panoramic view of Vargeão, the town where Anélio Thomazzoni, a pig farmer and large producer of biogas electricity in southern Brazil, lives. The 3,500 inhabitants of the municipality are largely small farmers who descend from Italian immigrants that came to Brazil in the 20th century. As the main economic activity in the western state of Santa Catarina, pig farming represents great potential for biogas production. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
VARGEÃO, Brazil, Oct 2 2019 (IPS)

“Biogas is the best energy, it has no contraindications,” and if you combine it with solar it becomes “the best energy business,” at least in Brazil, says Anélio Thomazzoni.

His enthusiasm is not merely rhetorical. He raises about 38,000 pigs on his property, Gavea Farm, and uses their manure to produce biogas that generates electricity, about 280,000 kilowatts/hour, for his own consumption and for third parties.

He is also building a larger biodigester and is preparing to install 6,000 square metres of solar panels on idle land on his farm, to generate another 130,000 kilowatt hours per month, in a region where a typical family consumes less than 1,000 kilowatts per month.

“I will have solar energy during the day and electricity from biogas when there is no sun”, the “most profitable forula in the world” in terms of energy and with benefits to the environment, Thomazzoni said.

“In addition, solar energy will allow me to save part of the biogas that I will convert into biomethane,” he told IPS on his 100-hectare farm that he owns with his brother.

Biomethane, a fuel equivalent to natural gas, is produced by purifying biogas. It should become more important as a result of the government’s plan to create a “new natural gas market” with a supply at reduced prices due to the growing deep-water production off Brazil’s shore.

“Alessandro Gardemann, president of the Brazilian Biogas Association (Abiogas), told IPS, “The gas pipeline network only supplies areas near the coast, so in the interior of the country the solution will be locally produced biogas.”

Trucks will have biomethane in a country where they are already made to run on natural gas, he said. The country has 1.9 million cargo vehicles, which provide 60 percent of cargo transport and move most of the agricultural production, according to transportation authorities.

The entrepreneurial spirit of Thomazzoni, who has lived all of his 56 years in the municipality of Vargeão, population 3,500, in the southern state of Santa Catarina, is alive and well.

Pig farmer Anélio Thomazzoni stands between the three biodigesters with which he currently produces biogas for the generation of 280,000 kilowatt/hours on his farm in the small municipality of Vargeão, in southern Brazil. Part of the biofuel will be purified to transform it into biomethane, while 6,000 square metres of solar panels are installed to generate 130,000 kilowatts/hour. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

He is building a new farm on another 50-hectare property, to raise an additional 30,000 pigs, but genetically improved breeding animals. In addition to meat, they will produce biogas, electricity and biofertiliser.

The Thomazzoni family moved from Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state, to Vargeão in 1957, in one of the waves of southern migration to the north and west of the country.

Initially dedicated to traditional crops, such as corn and later soy, he shifted to pig farming three decades ago. In 2003 they had about 10,000 pigs and began to produce biogas, in response to a demand from environmental authorities, in a state with strict environmental requirements.

He owned the first biodigester in western Santa Catarina, thanks to credits from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the predecessor to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.

Since 2015 it has been generating electricity from biogas, after two years of technological difficulties and a near bankruptcy, because the distribution concessionaire, Centrales Eléctricas de Santa Catarina, demanded the installation of cables and took 20 months to authorise the generation of electricity.

“I had stopped dreaming,” having purchased the generators and equipment and with no way to pay the loans that were falling due, Thomazzoni said.

A new biodigester, three times bigger than the previous ones, is under construction at the Thomazzoni brothers’ Gavea farm in southern Brazil. To the sides are some of the 32 sheds where pigs are raised in different phases of their lives: maternity, nursery and fattening. In the last two decades the business has diversified with the production of biogás, electricity and biofertilisers. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The road to success also included other setbacks, such as the loss of a biodigester canvas carried off by heavy winds.

“I planned and did everything we have here,” says the agribusinessman, pointing out some of his own “inventions” with which he replaced equipment so expensive in the market that “it would have made my business unviable.”

One is the use of water heated by an electric generator that pumps it through tubes that run into the biodigester, raising the internal temperature to boost the fermentation and productivity of the manure, especially during the wintertime when temperatures go down.

Another is a compressor that injects air into the biodigester, at a cost of 180 reais (45 dollars) – 330 times cheaper than the three filters he had purchased. “There are swindlers in the market who hinder biogas projects,” he said.

He uses the semi-solid waste from the biodigestion process, technically known as digestate, as fertiliser for planting hay, which is more productive because it is a perennial crop that is incorporated into an “integrated production” system as livestock feed. Corn and soy only produce two alternating annual crops, he explained.

Biogas is at the center of a chain that is the very “description of the circular economy,” according to Gardemann, also director of Geo Energética, a company that runs a large biogas from sugarcane waste project in the state of São Paulo.

Anélio Thomazzoni stands next to one of the three electric generators on his farm in southern Brazil. In addition to electricity, the equipment heats the water that is pumped through tubes running into the biodigesters to raise the temperature high enough to ferment pig manure. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The waste from the production of food or livestock feed is used to produce biogas, whose by-product is returned to the soil as nutrients for new food production, he pointed out.

“Biogas is a 24-hour battery,” he said, to emphasise that it is “continuously available energy that can be stored and used at any time” of the day or night, qualities that are more necessary now, when the use of intermittent sources such as wind and solar power is on the rise.

Abiogas aims to raise the share of biogas to 10 percent of Brazil’s energy mix, up from less than one percent today. It has the potential to supply “40 percent of the national electricity demand or substitute 70 percent of Brazil’s diesel consumption,” according to the industry association.

“The announced potential is not always real,” warned Ricardo de Gouvêa, Santa Catarina state secretary of agriculture, at the Southern Brazilian Forum on Biogas and Biomethane, held Sept. 4-6 in Chapecó, a city in the western part of the state.

Of the agricultural inputs, listed as the main source, half are not used or have other uses such as direct planting, because there is still no fully validated technology and the benefits of biogas often do not offset the costs of implementation, especially for small-scale producers, he said.

But “biogas is in fact the best source and now is its turn,” said Péricles Pinheiro, head of New Business at CHP Brazil, a company that provides equipment and solutions for distributed generation of electricity produced from gas.

It represents more continuously available energy at a time of unstable electric supply due to the growing use of intermittent sources, the approaching end of the useful life of 80,000 kilometres of transmission lines, and a distortion in national consumption data, he argued.

The higher cost of energy in the hours of greatest consumption, from 5 to 9 PM, made many consumers turn to their own diesel generators in the evenings, causing an apparent “drop” in demand after dark, when people turn on their lights and many household appliances.

If this information is not taken into account, the operation of the national power grid can increase the risk of blackouts. Biogas would help reduce that risk by expanding its share of the energy mix, Pinheiro said.

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The post Combining Biogas and Solar, the Best Energy Deal in Brazil appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks at the 2019 United Nations Climate Action Summit. PHOTO: LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS

By Habibullah N Karim
Oct 1 2019 (IPS-Partners)

The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued its latest warning saying that the world’s oceans are rising twice as fast as they did in the last century due to fast-disappearing ice-sheets in the Antarctic and Greenland. The IPCC predicts that as much as two-thirds of the permafrost could be gone before the end of the current century, further exacerbating carbon dioxide emissions as humongous amounts of CO2 trapped in the permafrost would be released in the process. In other words, all the apprehensions about climate change are much more menacing than anticipated earlier, making for huge shifts in climate patterns that will wreak havoc on the coastal cities and habitations around the world. On the one hand, rising sea levels will inundate low-lying coastal areas and, on the other hand, all the entrapped heat in the oceans will give rise to far more destructive cyclones more frequently. The world as we knew it in the pre-industrial era is gone for ever.

The level of change in the climate that humans have already caused can no longer be labelled an innocuous “climate change” but rather a pernicious “climate crisis”. This new reckoning is bound to cause major setbacks in countries like ours and should surely cause major headaches to socio-economic planners.

Bangladesh sits at the head of the funnel that directs all the atmospheric turbulence above the Indian Ocean to the narrow mouth of the Bay of Bengal, putting us at the receiving end of this huge climate crisis. But do we see anyone blowing the whistles on this one? The government seems complacent with the high growth rates the nation has achieved in recent years but all such growth prospects will be in serious jeopardy if we fail to address the climate crisis on a war footing.

15-year old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg stunned the world leaders last week at the UN General Assembly with her in-your-face proclamations on how climate change, nay, climate crisis, has robbed our children of their right to a prosperous future in a world sinking in its oceans and churning in its storms. That the world must rise in a body to counter the effects of anthropogenic global warming and arrest the rising global temperatures and devote resources to “carbon sequestering” is causing world leaders to cringe in their seats. Many world leaders are taking bold steps and major economic measures to counter climate change and many more are rising to the challenge being prodded by a fearless teenager from Sweden who dared to cross the Atlantic in a solar powered boat instead of taking a carbon-gushing plane ride to attend the UNGA meeting in New York. IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)—the global compact of climate Tsars—has been working on creating awareness and pushing for remedial actions on climate change for nearly three decades now but the world needed the prodding of a sharp-tongued and fiercely committed Greta Thunberg to jolt world leaders into fervent action on the impending climate crisis.

Bangladesh is a poster-child for climate change that brings to fore all the disastrously harmful effects of global warming; in all climate conferences Bangladesh is at the dead centre of discussions on how to mitigate the effects of and adapt to climate change but not much planning and activity is visible yet on the home front. Rather we had been in the news for all the wrong reasons, when Green Climate Fund resources were plundered by a government-sanctioned private bank that almost went belly up last year.

Sweden is a country with a large coastline where the effects of global warming is causing rapidly changing shorelines as the sea creeps inward relentlessly. Of course, Sweden has reasons to be highly concerned but it is a thinly-populated country with a high per capita income. It has the wherewithal and landmass to put up with climate change. That this nation of only 10 million has produced a Greta Thunberg to ring the carillon bell on climate change makes our lack of action in this area all the more poignant.

Bangladesh may not have as large a coastline as Sweden but our fragile coastline hosting the largest mangrove forest of the world and a population 17 times larger than Sweden’s at the mercy of the elements make it imperative that someone as fearless and as passionate as Greta comes forward to bell the cat on climate crisis before we become climate fodder. There is certainly no dearth of derring-do teenagers here as evidenced by the traffic revolt of the teens earlier this year. The clock is ticking for a climate uprising. Is anyone listening?

Habibullah N Karim is an author, policy activist, investor and serial entrepreneur. He is a founder and former president of BASIS and founder-CEO of Technohaven Company Ltd. Email: hnkarim@gmail.com

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

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Srinivas Tata, is Director, Social Development Division, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)
 
Eduardo Klien, is Regional Director, Asia, HelpAge International

By Srinivas Tata and Eduardo Klien
BANGKOK, Thailand, Oct 1 2019 (IPS)

As we are celebrating the International Day of Older Persons today, we recognize that population ageing is a human success story, a story of longer and often healthier lives of the world’s people. The many faces of older persons that we see in Asia and in the Pacific, and, indeed, all over the world, attest to this fact. Still, however, ageing is considered a threat. There is talk about the “burden of ageing”, exploding healthcare costs, and concerns about plummeting economic growth due to the shrinking labour force. In many cities of Asia-Pacific, we see advertisement for “anti-ageing cosmetics” and surgeries. The current ideal is that we must be young, dynamic and without wrinkles or grey hair, especially older women.

Srinivas Tata

Population ageing is a human success story and an inevitable outcome of the demographic transition. In Asia-Pacific, the pace of change is unprecedented, with fertility rates falling rapidly across the entire region and life expectancy rising, resulting in a rapid increase in the proportion of older persons. In 2000, those aged 65 or older made up 6.1 per cent of the population; in 2019 it was 8.7 per cent and in 2050 it is projected to be 18.4 per cent. In many European countries, it took almost a century to increase the share of the older population from 7 to 14 per cent. In Asia-Pacific, this is happening in as little as 18 to 20 years, such as in Sri Lanka and Viet Nam. This means that countries, and in particular policymakers need to act fast.

The region continues to be the prime driver of global economic growth, yet a significant proportion of the working age population is not covered by pensions. In several countries of the region, especially ones in South-East Asia and South and South-West Asia, coverage is well below 20 per cent. Similar challenges exist in terms of providing accessible and affordable health care, particularly for those left furthest behind. Robust social protection systems must be developed to address population ageing in a comprehensive manner. Because the majority of older persons are women, their needs must be specifically addressed.

Older persons make vital contributions to society; their role should not only be acknowledged, it should be made easier, including through improving their knowledge and skills through lifelong learning, promoting flexible working arrangements, and allowing them to have easy access to everyday conveniences, like public transportation. A study on the time use of men and women shows that overall, older persons provide more care than they receive. They provide care to grandchildren and other older persons who need care, with many intergenerational benefits, including indirect contributions to family income by making younger women freer to participate in the paid labour force. Ageing surveys have also found that the health of older persons tends to be better if they are socially connected, volunteer and contribute to society.

Eduardo Klien

Through older persons associations, older persons generate income, build up social support structures and provide access to credit, allowing them to stay more active and healthier. Mindsets need to change; we can worry less about shrinking working-age populations when we consider that people live longer and healthier. Pensions systems should be adapted to cover those in the informal sector and retirement ages adjusted to provide the choice to older persons to work up to a later age. We must alter our perception of ageing as a burden. Rather, policies and plans should see ageing as opportunity, with benefits to be harnessed.

Population ageing provides attractive business prospects, often identified as the “Silver Economy”. More products should be tailored to the needs of the growing older population, while universally designed products and the care economy can grow exponentially. Financial products and instruments, like reverse mortgages, can be designed to adapt to needs of older persons, including to use their immovable assets to fund financial requirements.

The young people of today are the older persons of tomorrow. Population ageing can only be addressed systematically if an intergenerational approach based on equity and seeing youth and ageing are part of a single continuum is adopted. Let us celebrate population ageing and embrace it. A fair society for older persons is a just and prosperous society for all ages.

ESCAP and HelpAge have recently joined forces to address population ageing more comprehensively through the organization of advocacy events and the collaboration on research on older persons. We stand ready to support countries in the region in designing and developing policies and programmes to ensure that older persons are not left behind.

The post No to Ageism, Yes to Intergenerational Equality appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Srinivas Tata, is Director, Social Development Division, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)

 

Eduardo Klien, is Regional Director, Asia, HelpAge International

The post No to Ageism, Yes to Intergenerational Equality appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley warned of a backlash of mass migration to the world’s richest and biggest polluters, saying an influx of climate refugees can be expected in coming years as a consequence of failing to take action to stop climate change. Courtesy: Desmond Brown

By Desmond Brown
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 1 2019 (IPS)

The Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley tells IPS her patience is running thin, as she challenges the world to tackle the climate crisis.

She warned of a backlash of mass migration to the world’s richest and biggest polluters, saying an influx of climate refugees can be expected in coming years as a consequence of failing to take action to stop climate change.

“The bottom line is that we are not here by accident. There is no traditional norm on the part of the world where I come from,” Mottley tells IPS.

In September 2014, Small Island Developing States met in Apia, Samoa for the Third International Conference on SIDS and adopted the Small Island Developing States Accelerated Modalities of Action, also known as the SAMOA Pathway. It is a 10-year plan to address challenges faced by small islands.

During last week’s United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), the world body convened a one-day, high-level review of progress made in addressing SIDS’ priorities in the first five years since implementation.

According to the world leaders, progress toward sustainable development in SIDS will require a major increase in investment.

Foreign Affairs Minister of Belize Wilfred Elrington says the mid-term review represents more than a simple reflection.

“It is a critical political moment, given the overwhelming challenges that threaten our sustainable development,” Elrington tells IPS.

“Our people receive daily reminders of the ticking clock for our survival. Last year we had a special report from the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] that predicted utter devastation for our countries if we missed the 1.5° C target.”

Elrington says the latest special report on the ocean and cryosphere from the IPCC projecting that 65 million people who inhabit islands and low-lying states are at risk of total inundation, only reinforced what is already happening.

“Our beaches are disappearing, our drinking water is being salinated, our oceans and seas are warming, acidifying and deoxygenating threatening our reefs and our fisheries. And if we are not experiencing more frequent flooding events, we are experiencing extreme drought events,” Elrington adds.

“Anyone of us could be the next to face a Category 5 hurricane or cyclone. We are the ground zero of a global climate and biodiversity crisis.”

Some of the specific development issues SIDS are faced with include their remoteness, transport connectivity, the small scale of their economies, the high cost of importing, the high cost of infrastructural development, vulnerability and climate vulnerability.

Already on the frontlines of climate change, sustainable development in many SIDS is threatened by difficulties in achieving sustained high levels of economic growth, owing in part to their vulnerabilities to the ongoing negative impacts of environmental challenges and external economic and financial shocks.

“It is diabolical and it is unbelievable. I refer to the plight of Barbuda whose cost of recovery was 10 times that which was pledged, and who still have not collected even that which was pledged,” Mottley says.

“I refer to Dominica, whose public service is minuscule to most countries but who are required to jump through the same hoops to unlock 300 million dollars in public funds while the people of Dominica, who were affected like the people of Abaco and Grand Bahama [in the Bahamas], don’t know where they’re going to earn money this week,” Mottley adds.

The prime minister says: “Twenty five years ago we met in Barbados and settle the Barbados Programme of Action, and on that occasion, we recognised that the wellbeing and welfare of Small Islands Developing States required special recognition and was a special case for our environment and our development.”

Meanwhile, Guyana’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Karen Cummings says even with their limited resources, SIDS have been doing their part, adding that her country has taken an “aggressive” approach towards climate change and has been “ambitious” in its nationally determined contribution commitments.

Leaders called on the international community to mobilise additional development finance from all sources and at all levels to support SIDS and welcomed the ownership, leadership and efforts demonstrated by these states in advancing the Implementation of the SAMOA Pathway.

They expressed their concern about the devastating impacts of climate change, the increasing frequency, scale and intensity of disasters and called for urgent and ambitious global action in line with the Paris Agreement to address these threats and their impacts.

The High-level Review of the SAMOA Pathway comes one month after Hurricane Dorian devastated parts of the Bahamas, causing significant loss of life and property damage.  Countries noted that the increasing frequency, scale and intensity of natural disasters will continue to claim lives, decimate infrastructure and remain a threat to food security.

While some progress has been made in addressing social inclusion, poverty, and unemployment, inequality continues to disproportionately affect vulnerable groups, including women and girls, persons with disabilities, children and youth. More support is needed to strengthen public health systems in SIDS and especially reduce the risk factors for non-communicable diseases, and healthcare after disasters.

Other areas identified as needing more effort include demographic data collection, trade opportunities, and economic growth and diversification.

Michael Tierney, Deputy Permanent Representative of Ireland to the United Nations and co-facilitator for the Political Declaration of the SAMOA Pathway midterm review, says SIDS have done excellent work in setting up a partnership framework at the United Nations, whereby the partnerships they are working on are monitored and registered and there is an analysis done of their effectiveness.

“It’s actually a model of other parts of the world to look at. It can be improved and it can be strengthened but there is a very detailed process here at the U.N. whereby we try to encourage new development partnerships for the islands, but also, we try to monitor and analyse what we’re doing and if we’re doing it well,” Tierney tells IPS.

“One of the things, quite frankly, that we need to do better is get more private sector interest in projects. That’s a problem across the board in the developing world but it’s something that is specifically a difficulty in the Small Island Developing States.”

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Children run away from a forest fire in a village in Palembang, South Sumatra, on Sept. 18. Credit: Antara Photo/Mushaful Imam

By Kaveh Zahedi
BANGKOK, Thailand, Oct 1 2019 (IPS)

Last week, world leaders gathered at the United Nations in New York for the Climate Action Summit. Their goal was simple: to increase ambition and accelerate action in the face of a mounting climate emergency.

For many, this means ambition and action that enable countries to decarbonize their economies by the middle of the century. But that is only half the equation.

Equally ambitious plans are also needed to build the resilience of vulnerable sectors and communities being battered by climate-related disasters of increasing frequency, intensity and unpredictability.

Nowhere is this reality starker than in the Asia-Pacific region, which has suffered another punishing year of devastation due to extreme events linked to climate change.

Last year, Kerala state in India had its worst floods in a century. The floods in Iran in April this year were unprecedented. Floods and heatwaves in quick succession in Japan caused widespread destruction and loss of life.

In several South Asian countries, immediately following a period of drought, weeks of heavy monsoon rains this month unleashed floods and landslides. Across North East and South Asia, record high temperatures have been set.

The latest research from the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP) has shown that intense heatwaves and drought are becoming more frequent.

Unusual tropical cyclones originate from beyond the traditional risk zones and follow tracks that have not been seen before, causing unprecedented floods throughout the region.

Science tells us the impacts are only going to increase in severity and frequency as the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere continues to rise.

The poor and vulnerable are taking the biggest hit. Disasters cost lives and damage livelihood and assets. Disaster exposure has increased child malnutrition and mortality rates and forced poor families to take children out of school – entrenching inter-generational poverty.

It also perpetuates inequalities within and between countries. A person in small-island developing states in the Pacific is three to five times more at risk of disasters than a person elsewhere in our disaster-prone region. Vanuatu has faced annual losses of over 20 percent of its gross domestic product.

In Southeast Asia, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam have all faced losses of more than five percent of their GDP. In short, disasters are slowing down and often reversing poverty reduction and widening inequality.

But amid this cycle of disaster and vulnerability lies a golden opportunity for careful and forward-looking investment. The Global Commission on Adaptation recently found that there would be over $7 trillion in total net benefits between now and 2030 from investing in early warning systems, climate-resilient infrastructure, improved dryland agriculture, mangrove protection and in making water resources more resilient.

So where could countries in the Asia-Pacific region make a start? First, by providing people with the means to overcome shocks. Increasing social protection is a good start.

Currently, developing countries in Asia and the Pacific only spend about 3.7 percent of their GDP on social protection, compared to the world average of 11.2 percent, leaving people vulnerable in case they get sick, lose their jobs, become old or are hit by a disaster.

In the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, we saw the effectiveness of social protection, especially cash transfers, but these were only made possible because the government was able to use a conditional cash transfer system and mechanism already in place for poor and vulnerable people.

Second, by lifting the financial burden of the poor. Disaster risk finance and insurance can cover poor and vulnerable people from climate shocks and help them recover from disasters.

A good example is Mongolia’s index-based insurance scheme which their government has been using to deal with the increased frequency of “dzuds,” where a combination of droughts and shortage of pasture lead to massive livestock deaths.

Disaster risk finance can also help countries pool the risks as is happening through the emerging Asean Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance program.

Third, by increasing investment in new technologies and big data. Artificial Intelligence-driven risk analytics, as well as the fast combination of sensor and geospatial data, can strengthen early warning systems.

Big data, including from mobile phones, can help identify and locate vulnerable populations in risk hotspots who have been the hardest to reach so far, ensuring faster, more targeted help after disasters.

Experience around the region has already shown the potential of using tech and big data to alleviate disaster risks. In India, a combination of automated risk analytics, geospatial data and a digital identity system – the so-called AADHARR system – have helped to identify and deliver assistance to millions of drought-affected subsistence farmers.

But much more investment is needed to make technology an integral part of disaster risk response and resilience building.

Climate-related disasters are likely to increase in the Asia-Pacific. This is our new climate reality. The Climate Action Summit provides the perfect platform to make the commitments needed for helping communities and people to adapt to this reality before decades of hard-won development gains are washed away.

The post Confronting New Climate Reality in Asia & the Pacific appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Kaveh Zahedi is the deputy executive secretary of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)

The post Confronting New Climate Reality in Asia & the Pacific appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Oct 1 2019 (IPS)

A conjuncture of developments, short- and medium-term, have conspired to further slow the world economy. In recent months, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), among others, has acknowledged that global economic prospects are worsening, forcing it to make not one, but at least five consecutive growth forecast revisions, all downward.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Prevention better than cure
With most developing economies more open and unequal than ever before, due to past government policies supporting a decade of economic liberalization, globalization and strengthened property rights, near term economic prospects are bleaker than ever.

In such circumstances, it would be prudent, even necessary, and certainly not profligate, to turn to counter-cyclical, expansionary fiscal policy. To do otherwise would be like rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic as it was about to crash into the iceberg.

Conservative or ‘neoliberal’ lobbyists, including those who have ‘infiltrated’ most government administrations, and their favourite ‘consultants’ are still chanting old mantras while their own gurus, e.g., in the Economist and Wall Street Journal, have become more pragmatic by necessity.

While some gurus have revised their old dogmas to accommodate reactionary ethno-populist challenges, their typically blindly loyal followers in emerging market economies continue to insist on tired, if not thoroughly discredited old slogans, such as the analytically bogus ‘fiscal consolidation’, in the face of the looming slowdown.

Sensible spending
All over the world, more realistic and pragmatic economists, forced to deal with real world problems, now publicly recognize that fiscal positions can be improved in the medium-term with appropriate short-term deficit spending.

Such fiscal spending should not only seek to buffer the economic downturn in the short-term, but also lay the foundations for medium-term economic development, which most developing countries have desperately needed, especially since the 2008-2009 Great Recession.

Instead of simply creating yet more public sector jobs, or building infrastructure ‘white elephants’ which would burden future generations for a long time to come, developing country governments should make fiscal commitments to improve human resources and yield sustainable development dividends in the medium and long-term.

Redistribution for development
Progressive income redistribution is more likely to raise aggregate demand through increased spending, while regressive transfers will achieve the converse. Social protection should be consolidated and disbursed more effectively, efficiently and equitably, thus strengthening aggregate demand while improving human welfare.

Appropriate investments to improve health, nutrition, education, training and needed infrastructure will pay significant development dividends in the medium and long-term. Meanwhile, universal health care should be financed by tax and other revenue as insurance options are more costly and encourage ‘perverse’ behaviours.

Of course, what governments can do is constrained by fiscal circumstances, but these should not be exaggerated or seen as immutable. All governments face choices in terms of what they choose to spend on, and most parameters can be changed over the medium-term, if not immediately.

Means constrain ends
A relatively upper middle-income country should boldly consider previously unthinkable options, some of which may still be beyond the means of other developing countries. In this connection, well-coordinated ‘all of government’ efforts can yield huge dividends.

For example, transformative, Japanese-style universal school lunch programs were first introduced early in the last century when the island nation still had little in terms of foreign exchange earnings. The program has successfully enhanced nutrition and health, but also the appreciation for science and civilization of all engaged. School food procurement has also been used to promote safer and healthier food production.

Similarly, the development of generic medicines, especially for neglected tropical diseases, will be important for many, if not most developing countries, while biofortified healthy food has tremendous potential for overcoming hunger, micronutrient deficiencies and diet-related non-communicable diseases.

Finally, selective investment and technology promotion is desperately needed after years of chimera-chasing and ersatz techno-sloganeering. As the world struggles to mitigate global warming, developing countries deserve considerable financial and technical support to modernize their economies with renewable energy, bypassing fossil fuel options.

Prevent abuse from the outset
The urgently needed turn to counter-cyclical public spending must be mindful of the waste and abuse of the past hiding behind noble-sounding rhetoric. Abuse of or even poorly conceived government spending will not only discredit public policies generally, but also set back these economies, their prospects and people further back.

Simply buying over existing privately held assets will not enhance economic capacities, capabilities and output. Similarly, pouring good money after bad money, including the corrupt or fraudulent investments of previous governments will not improve them.

As multilateral institutions and arrangements are increasingly being deliberately undermined, developing country governments have little choice but to fend for themselves and their people, while avoiding the temptations of jingoist nationalism, especially ‘beggar thy neighbour’ and selfish ecologically destructive policies.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, was United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, and received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.

The post Countercyclical Fiscal Policy Needed to Counter Global Economic Downturn appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The post Caribbean Adopts Remote Sensing to Prepare for Hurricanes appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

In this Voices from the Global South podcast, Caribbean correspondent Jewel Fraser learns how remote sensing technology can help the region better prepare for natural disasters.

The post Caribbean Adopts Remote Sensing to Prepare for Hurricanes appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Children rest beneath a tree in a makeshift camp in Aqrabat village, near the Turkish border, after fleeing hostilities in Idlib. (June 2019). Credit: © UNICEF/Aaref Watad.

By External Source
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 1 2019 (IPS)

There is a “sign of hope for the long-suffering Syrian people” as a Syrian-led, Syrian-owned, credible and inclusive Constitutional Committee is set to start deliberations next month, the United Nations Special Envoy for the country told the Security Council on Monday.

As the “first concrete political agreement” between the Government and opposition groups, it “implies a clear acceptance of the other as an interlocutor”, said Geir O. Pedersen. “It commits their nominees to sit together in face-to-face dialogue and negotiation, while at the same time opening the space for civil society at the table”.

After years of intense negotiation, Secretary-General António Guterres announced last Monday that the Syrian Government and the Syrian Negotiations Commission had agreed to form “a credible, balanced and inclusive Constitutional Committee that will be facilitated by the UN in Geneva”.

“Step by step we need to build the kind of safe, calm and neutral environment that could make Syrians feel that the political process can restore their country and respond to their aspirations”
Geir O. Pedersen, United Nations Special Envoy for Syria


It offers “a new social contract to help repair a broken country”, he flagged, saying it “can be a door opener to a wider political process” and, if accompanied by other steps to build trust and confidence among Syrians and the international community, “a step along the difficult path out of this conflict”.

 

Nuts and bolts

The agreement’s core terms of reference are framed by the key principles of respect for the UN Charter, Security Council resolutions, Syria’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity.

The UN envoy spelled out that the constitutional reforms adopted by the Committee “must be popularly approved and transposed into the national legal order by a means that will need to be agreed”.

He outlined the Committee’s structure, which will consist of “equal co-chairs” one from the Government, the other from the opposition; a 45-person body consisting of 15 Government, 15 opposition and 15 civil society members to prepare and draft proposals; and a 150-person body from the same sectors, each with 50 members, to discuss and adopt proposals – with a 75 per cent decision-making threshold.

Noting that the UN will release the names of the 150 members after they have been confirmed, he pointed out that the 50 civil society actors hail from different religious, ethnic and geographical backgrounds; some live inside Syria while others are based outside; and nearly half are women.

“Both parties have told me that they have confidence in the United Nations and want to work with us in a sustained and constructive manner”, said Mr. Pedersen, adding: “We will do everything we can to meet their expectations”.

“Ensuring sufficient credibility, balance and inclusivity…has been a key priority”, the UN envoy said, admitting that “the result is a negotiated compromise, and like all compromises, no one is completely satisfied”.

Lauding the “outstanding work” of “Syrian experts and activists, men and women, on all sides” that have helped create this new public space for democratic and civic debates, he acknowledged that not all of them could be on the Committee, but expressed confidence that “they will continue to make their voices heard”.

“The future constitution of Syria belongs to the Syrian people and them alone”, he stressed.

“Syrians, not outsiders, will draft the constitution, and the Syrian people must popularly approve it”, maintained Mr. Pedersen.

Pointing to the continuing humanitarian crisis in Idlib; ongoing terrorism concerns; violence – and the plight of displaced, abducted and missing civilians – the Special Envoy recognized that many challenges persist, and appealed to all parties to “seize upon the momentum that the Committee offers and take concrete actions, to build trust and confidence”.

“Step by step”, Mr. Pederson told Council members, “we need to build the kind of safe, calm and neutral environment that could make Syrians feel that the political process can restore their country and respond to their aspirations”.

This story was originally published by UN News

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The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) seeks disclosure of files under the U.S. intelligence community’s “duty to warn” obligations, which demand officials alert folks in imminent danger. The CPJ wants to know if they knew about an assassination plot against Jamal Khashoggi. Photo by Sam McGhee on Unsplash

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 30 2019 (IPS)

A media watchdog has asked United States intelligence agencies to reveal whether they knew about an assassination plot against Jamal Khashoggi and failed to warn the Saudi journalist he was in mortal danger.

A legal brief, filed in a Washington DC district court by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), comes almost exactly one year after a Saudi hit squad butchered the renegade writer inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.

CPJ’s advocacy manager Michael DeDora told IPS that his lawsuit against the U.S. government “asks a simple question: did the intelligence community know of yet fail to warn Jamal Khashoggi of threats to his life?”

Khashoggi, a U.S.-based Washington Post columnist, who was once a royal Saudi insider and had grown critical of the regime, was reportedly lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in an elaborate and brutal plot to silence him.

Khashoggi was allegedly killed, dismembered and removed from the building; his remains were never found. The CIA reportedly assessed that crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, known as MBS, had ordered the operation.

The CPJ seeks disclosure of files under the U.S. intelligence community’s “duty to warn” obligations, which demand officials alert folks in imminent danger. The brief, filed Thursday, follows the Trump administration’s rejection of a previous CPJ disclosure request.

“Nearly one year after Khashoggi’s murder, disclosure of these documents would provide transparency and help efforts to secure accountability,” DeDora told IPS in an email.

“But this lawsuit has broader implications: journalists around the world should have the security of knowing that the U.S. will not ignore threats to their lives.” 

Khashoggi’s assassination sparked global outrage, blighted MBS’ global standing and undercut his ambitions to improve the kingdom’s poor human rights record and diversify its economy away from hydrocarbons. 

Saudi officials, who initially said Khashoggi had left the consulate unharmed, now say he was killed in a rogue operation that did not involve the prince. A domestic Saudi trial of 11 suspects is widely viewed as a sham.

Speaking with IPS among a small group of journalists in New York this month, Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s former fiancée, explained how she was saddened by the lack of global pressure on Riyadh to come clean about the affair.

MBS has not visited Europe or the U.S. since the murder. While the prince was briefly shunned by foreign leaders, Riyadh’s long-standing diplomatic support from the U.S., Britain and others has largely resumed.

“This silence and inertia created huge disappointment on my side,” said Cengiz. 

“Countries could have demonstrated a more honourable attitude instead of remaining silent, particularly the United Nations, the European Union and the five members of the U.N. Security Council.”

Cengiz was joined at an event on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly by Agnes Callamard, the U.N. rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions who investigated the killing and concluded it was a “deliberate, premeditated execution,” and called for MBS and other officials to be probed.

Callamard, a French academic, said she knew that achieving justice for Khashoggi’s murder would be an uphill struggle, given Riyadh’s deep pockets, clout in the world energy markets and powerful friends in Washington, London and elsewhere.

“This single year [since Khashoggi’s death] is just the first phase in our journey for accountability and justice. And that means that it will demand and deserve patience, resilience, and time,” said Callamard.

“Early on, I could see that justice for Jamal Khashoggi would have to be found beyond the usual path and beyond our usual understanding of accountability.”

Callamard urged the CIA to publish its files, while also calling for an FBI investigation and a public inquest in Turkey. Meanwhile, a draft U.S. law on human rights and accountability, if enacted, would unmask and sanction the culprits and send “ripple effects” towards accountability around the world.

Related Articles

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• Don’t “Whitewash” Khashoggi’s Murder
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By Crystal Orderson
LHASA, Sep 30 2019 (IPS)

Tibetan medicine is one of the world’s oldest known traditional medicines, originally developed during the pre-Buddhist era in the kingdom known as Shang Shung. IPS correspondent Crystal Oderson visited one of the major Tibetan health facilities in Lhasa…. and got a glimpse of the age old tradition.

The post Medical Centres Cover Every Village in Tibet appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A new simulation depicts the consequences of a U.S.-Russian nuclear exchange. Credit: Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University

By Daryl G. Kimball
WASHINGTON DC, Sep 30 2019 (IPS)

Over the long course of the nuclear age, millions of people around the world, often led by a young generation of clear-eyed activists, have stood up to demand meaningful, immediate international action to halt, reduce, and end the threat posed by nuclear weapons to humankind and the planet.

Today, a new generation is mobilizing to demand dramatic action to address another existential threat: the human-induced climate emergency. The scientific consensus is that climate change causes and impacts are increasing, and little more than a decade is left to take the bold steps necessary to cut global carbon emissions in half and reverse the slide toward catastrophe.

The disarmament movement has achieved success in reducing nuclear dangers before, but there is no room for complacency. The nuclear threat has not gone away. Nuclear competition is growing. The risk of nuclear war is increasing.

Just as dramatic action is needed to avoid climate change catastrophe, immediate and decisive action is required to counter the growing threat of nuclear war before it is too late.

A qualitative global nuclear arms race is now underway. The world’s nine nuclear-armed actors are collectively squandering hundreds of billions of dollars to maintain and improve their arsenals. Tensions between nuclear-armed states are on the rise. Key treaties are under threat.

With the loss of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in August, the only remaining treaty verifiably limiting the world’s two largest arsenals is the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which is due to expire in less than 17 months.

Washington and Moscow are pursuing the development of destabilizing types of weapons, including new lower-yield, “more usable” nuclear weapons. Each side still clings to Cold War-era nuclear launch-under-attack postures that increase the risk of miscalculation.

The use of nuclear weapons—even on a so-called “limited” scale—creates the potential for global catastrophe. A new simulation developed by scientists at Princeton University estimates that if, in a U.S.-Russian confrontation in the Baltics, one side resorts to the “tactical” use of nuclear weapons and the other responds, their current war plans could lead to an escalatory exchange involving 1,700 nuclear detonations against military and civilian targets.

Within five hours, nearly 100 million people would be killed or injured.

Many more people would suffer and die in the weeks and months afterward. A new study of the longer-term climatic effects of a large-scale U.S.-Russian nuclear exchange estimates that the resulting fallout and fires would inject 150 million metric tons of soot and smoke into the earth’s upper atmosphere within two weeks, resulting in a drop in global temperatures of 9 degrees Celsius and a 30 percent drop in precipitation within 12 months.

The resulting nuclear winter would wreak havoc on food production and lead to global famine.

Effective policies to address the nuclear threat must begin with the understanding that the only way to eliminate the threat of nuclear war is to eliminate nuclear weapons. The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is a crucial step in this direction, but it is not an all-in-one solution to reduce today’s nuclear dangers.
Leading nuclear and non-nuclear states need to take overdue, common-sense steps necessary to halt and reverse the arms race, reduce the salience of nuclear weapons, eliminate the most destabilizing types of weapons, and create the conditions for nuclear disarmament.

To start, all nuclear-armed states should reaffirm the 1985 pledge made by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

The Kremlin has recently proposed that U.S. and Russian leaders reissue a joint statement along these lines, but Washington has demurred.

Nuclear-armed states should agree to adopt policies that reduce nuclear risks, such as no first use of nuclear weapons. Given the risks of escalation, there is no plausible circumstance that could justify legally, morally, or militarily the use of nuclear weapons to deal with a non-nuclear threat.

Washington and Moscow also should extend New START by five years as allowed by the treaty and immediately begin talks on a follow-on deal to set lower limits on all types of nuclear weaponry, including nonstrategic nuclear weapons; a new agreement dealing with ground-launched, intermediate-range systems; and new restrictions on destabilizing missile defense deployments and long-range hypersonic weapons.

Further U.S.-Russian progress on disarmament would pressure the other nuclear actors, including China, to agree to freeze the overall size of their smaller but still deadly nuclear arsenals and agree to joint nuclear risk-reduction measures, such as ratification of the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and join talks on nuclear disarmament.

The catastrophic consequences of failure on climate change and nuclear weapons are well documented, the steps necessary to mitigate the risks are well known, and the public demand for action is powerful. But the political will to take action is weak.

To give future generations the chance to eliminate the nuclear danger, our generation must act decisively to reduce the threat of nuclear war and put us back on the path to global zero.

The post The Risk of Nuclear War is Increasing appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Daryl G. Kimball is Executive Director, Arms Control Association

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Credit: Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNOHCR)

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 30 2019 (IPS)

The United Nations commemorated its annual World Day of Migrants and Refugees (WDMR) on September 29 —- this time amidst rising anti-immigrant rhetoric and widespread xenophobia.

The right-wing populist attacks have come mostly from politicians and political leaders primarily in Europe, the United States and Australia.

“Those who do not put clear limits on migration will soon start to feel like strangers in their own land,” Austria’s former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, was quoted as saying.

Hungary’s hard-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has proclaimed his intention to protect Europe from “a Muslim invasion” says “in the world today, there are basically two types of leaders: globalists and patriots” –- a sentiment strongly asserted by US President Donald Trump at the UN General Assembly September 24.

And as a follow-up, the Trump administration announced September 26 that the US will accept only about 18,000 refugees, out of an anticipated 368,000 claims, in 2020: down from the current limit of 30,000 and a fraction of the 110,000 the Obama administration allowed in 2016.

“At the core of the Trump administration’s foreign policy is a commitment to make decisions made on reality, not wishes, and to drive optional outcomes based on concrete facts”, the US State Department said in its official announcement last week.

In France, and in several other European countries, there are fears of a “grand replacement” of the country’s original “white population” with newer arrivals, mostly from conflict ridden nations in Africa and the Middle East.

These fears have been vociferously reinforced by hard right politicians not only in the US, Hungary and Austria but also in Italy, UK, Poland, France, Sweden and Australia.

Germany was the only country in Europe to admit about one million refugees by the end of 2018, a decision that had heavy political costs for Chancellor Angela Merkel.

In a report released September 19, the United Nations said the number of international migrants globally reached an estimated 272 million in 2019, an increase of 51 million since 2010.

Currently, international migrants comprise 3.5 per cent of the global population, compared to 2.8 per cent in the year 2000.

According to the report, titled International Migrant Stock 2019, a dataset released by the Population Division of the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), in 2019, regionally, Europe hosts the largest number of international migrants (82 million), followed by Northern America (59 million) and Northern Africa and Western Asia (49 million).

At the country level, about half of all international migrants reside in just 10 countries, with the United States of America hosting the largest number of international migrants (51 million), equal to about 19 per cent of the world’s total.

Germany and Saudi Arabia host the second and third largest numbers of migrants (13 million each), followed by the Russian Federation (12 million), the United Kingdom (10 million), the United Arab Emirates (9 million), France, Canada and Australia (around 8 million each) and Italy (6 million).

Meanwhile the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) says so far this year, over 63,000 migrants and refugees have entered Europe by sea–almost 30,000, or almost half of the yearly total number of people have arrived in the past nine weeks.

About four out of five migrants or refugees enter Europe through Greece or Spain, with others arriving mostly in Italy, Malta or Cyprus.

The IOM has also launched five campaigns to prevent the risks of irregular migration and to encourage informed decision-making among young Central American migrants.

The campaigns are taking place in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

Brandon Wu, Director of Policy and Campaigns at ActionAid USA, told IPS: “Certainly, we expect migration trends to continue increasing.”

Instead of addressing the root causes of migration, he pointed out, governments are largely ignoring them.

“We are not investing in solutions to the climate crisis, either in terms of reducing emissions or supporting communities to adapt to climate impacts. We are not investing in food security or to support rural livelihoods”, he noted.

Wu said governments like the U.S. are not changing harmful foreign policies that are driving conflict and persecution.

“A deterrent strategy of persecuting migrants after they have already left their homes can only go so far – to reverse the trend of increasing migration, we have to address the reasons that people move, and no governments are truly tackling these issues at the right scale,” he declared.

He said the strategy used by Europe and U.S. to expand its borders outwards for the purposes of keeping migrants at arms’ length is fundamentally flawed.

“It’s a temporary solution at best, especially in the case of the U.S. which is now relying on terribly politically unstable countries like Honduras or El Salvador to absorb asylum seekers.”

The policy solutions that would actually best serve to protect the rights of migrants would be a combination of welcoming them into recipient countries and providing them the same social services afforded to citizens, and shifting policies (including foreign policy, foreign assistance, climate policy and more) to address the reasons why people are migrating in the first place, declared Wu.

Credit United Nations

Singling out the vulnerabilities of women in the refugee crisis, Jacqui Hunt, Director of Equality Now’s Europe and Eurasia Office, told IPS pre-existing sex inequalities mean that women and girls already face multifaceted disadvantages and this is compounded by other factors such as poverty, ethnic or cultural background, disability, and age.

Women generally have fewer assets to rely upon, lower levels of education, and are often absent from decision-making.

Also compounding their vulnerability are legal inequalities such as sex discriminatory citizenship rights, said Hunt, who has spearheaded several of Equality Now’s successful campaigns, including for the creation of a UN Working Group to focus on ending discrimination against women in law and in practice..

When people flee from conflict or natural disasters, they lose their home, livelihood and social network. Families that previously might have been able to afford to feed and educate several children may resort to marrying off their daughters in exchange for a dowry or simply because it means there is one less person to provide for, she pointed out.

Hunt said refugees and asylum seekers are often forced to live in impoverished and desperate conditions with limited choices, placing women and girls at greater risk of sexual assault, exploitation and trafficking.

“The international community needs to address the underlying sex discrimination faced by women and girls and how this also has a disproportionate impact on women and girls’ migration. It should position this dimension at the centre of policy discussions and implementation.”

This, she said, requires a gender responsive approach that involves women in all levels of decision making. Governments must strengthen their commitments to take action and be held accountable for their commitments and legal protections.

The Sustainable Development Goals and other international standards and objectives can help guide the way, she declared.

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@ips.org

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Global Green Growth Institute’s Director General Frank Rijsberman pictured here at COP24. Credit: Sohara Mehroze Shachi/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 27 2019 (IPS)

A week ago, downtown New York witnessed one of the most historic moments in the climate action moment — hundreds of thousands of people attended the Climate Strike, where teen activists delivered powerful speeches and blows to world leaders for not taking climate change seriously.

Dr. Frank Rijsberman Director-General of the treaty-based Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), attended the strike — but for him, it wasn’t just about that one moment. As someone who’s worked in sustainable development for more than three decades, this was a long time coming. And upon his return to Seoul, South Korea, where GGGI is headquartered, his 10-year-old son will skip school on Friday to attend the Climate Strike there.

During an intense week in New York as the United Nations General Assembly convenes, where climate action is at the centre of the debate this year, Rijsberman sat down with IPS for a brief chat on what the next decade will bring in the climate action momentum, and what role GGGI will play. Excerpts of the interview follow:

Inter Press Service (IPS): Given the current climate at this year’s UNGA, there’s a lot more momentum on climate action, so where does GGGI’s work stand?

Dr. Frank Rijsberman (FR): I read quite a few negative stories about the summit yesterday [Monday] but I don’t quite see it that way, particularly now I think we have some 70 countries committed to Net Zero by 2050 up from like 20 last year. I think more and more countries signing on to that.

Some journalists are taking on the fact that the leaders who are signing on to those targets don’t know exactly how to achieve those but, I was in a few meetings with the Danish Prime Minister who made the Net Zero commitment and a 70 percent reduction by 2030 commitment, which is one of the strongest targets. And she admitted, that we don’t know how to get there. She actually turned around and said, “If we knew exactly how to get there then our target wouldn’t be ambitious enough because we ought to develop new technology.”

You create the target and then you go to work on how to achieve it. I think that’s the positive side of that story and then we see a lot of initiatives that are all pointed on that from clean energy investment accelerators, initiatives around accelerating energy efficiency up to 3 percent per year, doubling the current rates so there are a lot of initiatives that are contributing and all of it are leaning to supporting and enabling countries to come up with more ambitious targets by the COP next year in Glasgow.

It would’ve been nice if there were a lot of binding commitments shared yesterday in the climate summit but I would see this more as a stepping stone to urge countries to be ready with those commitments next year and frankly the speed with which countries sign up to the Net Zero target is pretty impressive.

IPS: Do you think there’s as better response from countries this year than previous years?

FR: Last year was 20, now it’s 70 countries that have committed to Net Zero.

There are more countries now that are recognising there’s a climate crisis – they no longer [talk about] climate change, this neutral language. They’re talking about the climate crisis and emergency and responding to it like that with the laws, climate laws, and then we’re going to have to go figure out how to do that which is not so easy but not so impossible either.

IPS: These are developed countries, so where do developing countries fit in?

FR: Our members are all the way from Denmark to Qatar and [the United Arab Emeritus] UAE down to countries in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. So, leaders are on one hand clearly the Denmarks and the UKs of the world and on the other hand we worked with Fiji to come up with their lower development strategy 2050.

In between, there are countries like Indonesia and Vietnam who are really struggling because they are the ones that have a lot of coal and have developed their industry very successfully based on coal and fossil fuel. They’re the ones that are going to have to make the most difficult choices. They don’t have a lot of money, they feel they can’t afford it but yes they’re confronted with air pollution.

I think the best, most helpful example was China. In China, people were fed up with never seeing blue skies and having to wear air pollution masks. Air pollution and health concerns of the citizen are driving a lot of the investments in clean energy in Asia. And of course what you do for blue skies and for air pollution, you also do for the climate.

In a country like Vietnam, for instance, last year our story was that Vietnam was the country with the largest number of new coal fire power plants. They were going to build 25 new coal fire plants. And then the government came out with a new policy – [companies] get offered a [tariff] for large-scale solar.

Vietnam had a target to reach 4.5GW of solar then by 2025. This is a lot if you have nothing.

The target was to be reached by 2025, and to everybody’s surprise they reached that on the 1st of July this year.

From nothing to 4.5GW — and not plans, not ideas but projects that are already built and connected to the grid.

So, what happened to India in 2017, that the country was going to build all those coal fire power plants, and then they did these major renewable energy auctions, and they found the price of solar is lower than building coal fire power plants. In 2017, India scrapped the idea of building new coal fire power plants.

Of course they still have a lot of coal fire power plants and they haven’t closed them. And that was the disappointment that Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi didn’t say anything about how he’s going to close them but they’re no longer going to build new ones because solar is cheaper.

So that has happened this year in Vietnam and that should happen next year (but hasn’t happened yet) in Indonesia.

IPS: Price of solar — there’s a myth that adopting these practices cost more but clearly they’re being demystified now. Is there a better awareness among countries now?

FR: Well, gradually. Vietnam believes it, but Indonesia not yet. When we go to Indonesia, we’re still working hard on awareness. Vietnam doesn’t really have as much awareness in pollution. In Seoul, people wear masks when the air is bad. You go to Vietnam, people aren’t wearing masks so you think the air must be better here. But no, the air is just as bad — people just don’t know about it yet.

So I think raising awareness of both the negative impacts of air pollution, climate change and that there are solutions that are commercially attractive is still a big part of the job. 

That’s why there’s still work for organisations like ours, spreading these stories, showing the examples, helping the government develop the right policy framework and bringing in investors as well.

IPS: Are investors on board?

FR: Yes, so I was in a number of events here. We’ve been saying the billions of dollars can come from development aid, the trillions of dollars have to come from pension funds and private sector.

If you’re paying into your pension fund you want your savings to be invested in a solid place, so your retirement is still there. So they’re the lowest risk investors.

But in Denmark, the pension fund has invested something like 15 billion dollars in their offshore wind industry and they’re not confident that in the next 10 years, they can invest 50 billion dollars in renewable energy. Just small Denmark, their pension fund, that’s where the trillions of dollars sit.

We may raise 10 billion dollars for the Green Climate Fund. Pension Denmark by itself will invest 50 billion dollars so the numbers indeed in the private sector are in trillions and they’re beginning to be mobilised.

So our work is showing that in the emerging markets that are also good investment opportunities for pension funds like Pension Denmark, and the role of the Danish government is to help Pension Denmark feel good enough about their investments in say, Africa, that they’ll risk their money so that the credit guarantee can come from Danish government as part of development aid and the money can come from the pension funds. That’s where the big money is.

So our job is to use the billions of development aid to mobilise the trillions from the private sector and institutional investors. And one of the most hopeful signs is that we can see that that is now starting to happen.

IPS: We’re now entering a new decade. What is GGGI’s plans for what’s ahead?

FR: We’re making our strategy 2030 and of course our goal is to support our member countries to be leaders in this green transition. Some of our members like Denmark really are and they are really interested in helping our other members like Ethiopia and Indonesia to implement the green transition as well.

So our mission remains to use the experience and the money of some our contributing members to help accelerate the green transition in the other countries. We are pretty optimistic, pretty positive that there is great potential for that.

In the last two years we have mobilised about a billion dollars in green and climate finance for our members and now we have a target for 2030….to mobilise 16 billion dollars in climate finance and if we do that, then through our action that would save a gigaton in emissions, that would create two million new green jobs, that would provide sustainable services for 300 million people in green cities. So we have ambitious plans in line with the Paris agreement and SDGs to support our members to achieve those goals and targets.    

IPS: What would you say are your challenges in negotiating with member countries?

FR: Among our high-income countries we have the real leaders like Denmark and Australia, then we have some African countries that are totally ready but they say we need financial help and then we all have Asian countries as we discussed who are all those Asian tigers, develop their economies based on not green but brown technologies.

So they are the ones that are the biggest challenge. But they do also have more money to invest like Vietnam, if they want to. So the challenges are a bit different in these different groups of our countries but bringing them together, and in a way organising a consensus, among our members that green transition is necessary and also feasible. That’s our job.

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The post Q&A: How Vietnam went from Zero to Hero in Developing Solar Projects and What Other Countries Can Do for Climate Change appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Slovak daily Dennik N marks the United Nations climate change summit in New York this week with a special 'green' edition and front page title "How To Cool the World”. Credit: Ed Holt/IPS

By Ed Holt
Sep 27 2019 (IPS)

In 2014, worried about editorial independence after local businessmen bought a substantial stake in the major Slovak daily newspaper they worked at, a small group of journalists left in protest and set up their own paper run solely by the journalists themselves to ensure impartiality.

Written off by many media analysts at the time who said starting a completely new independent newspaper would be an impossible task, Dennik N – Dennik is the Slovak word for daily newspaper and the N stands for Nezavislost, which means independence – is today one of Slovakia’s most popular news outlets with both print and web versions.

Determined to maintain its editorial independence, from the start the paper has used a subscription model to generate the majority of its funding.

A group of six people from the Slovak global IT security company ESET invested in the paper in its first year of operations, taking a 51 percent share in the company which publishes the newspaper. They still hold that share today with the remaining 49 percent owned by the paper’s journalists. Specific agreements with the six businessmen forbid them from having any editorial involvement in the newspaper.

They went on to develop the Readers’ Engagement and Monetisation Platform (REMP), an open source software and subscription platform that allows them to engage directly with subscribers so they can tell publishers what they want to read—effectively proving that Slovak readers want quality, independent journalism and are prepared to pay for it.

Lukas Fila, one of the original founders of Dennik N and now chief executive of the company which publishes the paper, speaks to IPS about the advantages of the paper’s subscription model, how growing numbers of readers consider it completely normal to pay for quality journalism content, threats to press freedom in Slovakia and helping media elsewhere copy their success.

Inter Press Service (IPS): Your newspaper was founded by journalists, including yourself, who left another Slovak daily because of fears over editorial independence after a major local business group took a large stake in the paper. Your newspaper decided to use subscription as its main funding source to try and ensure you could maintain editorial independence. Is it not possible for newspapers – in Slovakia or elsewhere – to be editorially independent without relying on subscriptions for the majority of their financing?

Lukas Fila (LF): Of course it is possible. Firstly, many would argue that editorial independence is not strictly related to economic independence. In other words – that you can do good journalism regardless of whether you’re earning enough to sustain your operation in the long run on a commercial basis. And you could probably find examples of this, although it is not a view we share. 

Secondly, there are also other business models that allow media organisations to earn enough money, especially through advertising revenue or specialised products, such as organising conferences, selling books, or providing specialised analyses. 

However, digital subscription has several advantages – the number of people who are starting to realise that it’s normal to pay for online content is growing. Moreover, it is most closely associated with the essence of journalism – providing quality content to your audience. It forces you to constantly think about ways of providing content that people feel is worth paying for.  

IPS: Simply being majority funded by subscriptions would not alone guarantee editorial independence. How do you ensure you remain editorially independent, especially given that a group of very rich local businessmen, have a majority stake in your newspaper?

LF: The six co-owners of ESET have a 51 percent stake in the company. The shareholders’ agreement has various provisions guaranteeing editorial independence, for example a clause which makes it impossible for them to fire the editor in chief. However, what is most important is that our owners have no dealings with the state or other commercial conflicts of interests, they currently have no role in the management of the company, and at no point have they in any way tried to influence the content of the paper. This is despite the fact that they have come under heavy attack from politicians who feel threatened by our reporting. Editorial independence is not really an issue at Dennik N, we have the greatest independence imaginable. 

IPS: Have any other major Slovak news outlets followed your subscription-based model and if so, have they done it to maintain editorial independence?

LF: Subscription-based models were being tried in Slovakia even prior to our launch. One of my colleagues, Tomas Bella, was the founder of Piano, which is currently a global leader in providing pay wall systems to publishers. There are several Slovak publications that are successful at running subscription schemes, their motivation is both editorial and commercial. 

 IPS: At a time when many news media all over the world are facing problems to remain financially sustainable, do you think the model you have adopted is sustainable in the long-term?

LF: Our model is probably most immune to changes on the market. While advertising revenue can change dramatically, having a loyal subscription base is something you can rely on in the long run. 

IPS: Your newspaper was originally largely a political and investigative news publication. Did you decide to take that specific relatively narrow focus because you believed there was a gap in the market for that and/or Slovak readers wanted a newspaper like that?

LF: The focus is no longer as narrow. We currently provide diverse content – we do sports, lifestyle, culture, science, we do podcasts, books, educational projects, and we just launched a business publication called Dennik E. 

In a good month our traffic exceeds 1 million unique visitors in a country of 5 million people. You can’t really achieve those numbers with a very narrow focus. The initial format was the result of several factors – the type of journalists that decided to start Dennik N, our idea about what type of content would best attract the first group of subscribers, an effort to keep costs down at what was already a costly and risky enterprise. We started with under 50 people and 6,000 people that supported us in our crowdfunding stage. We currently have more than 70 people working here and 42,000 subscribers. And we hope to expand further.  

IPS: Could REMP help other newspapers which want to move more towards reader-based funding to maintain their editorial independence?

LF: Yes. The system is being used by several Czech and Slovak publishers and is being tried out by several large publishers outside the [Central European] region. The advantage of REMP is that our whole survival was dependent on it. We really had no other major focus than the quality of our journalism and the ability to monetise it. That is a big advantage over those that develop similar products only as a product to be used by others.  

IPS: Slovakia has fallen down the international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders’s press freedom index in recent years with the group, as well as the European Commission, raising concerns over editorial independence in local media as oligarchs have bought up media houses and politicians have repeatedly attacked journalists. Do you feel press freedom in Slovakia is under serious threat?

LF: We’ve had this feeling since we started Dennik N. That was the primary motivation [for starting the newspaper]. One could argue that our success helped the situation at least to a small degree – it is now obvious that the entire market cannot be controlled by oligarchs, plus it probably gave journalists in other editorial rooms more courage to speak up. But the ownership changes are still not over, and sadly, they are usually for the worse. If you add in uncertainty about the results of next year’s parliamentary elections [in Slovakia], the situation could deteriorate quickly. 

IPS: When local journalist Jan Kuciak, and his fiancée Martina Kusnirova, were killed last year because of what police said was his journalism work, many journalists said at the time that politicians’ attitudes to journalists had helped breed an atmosphere of hate towards journalists in which the murder could happen. Would you agree with that and do you think politicians have changed their attitudes to journalists since then?

LF: It is becoming more and more obvious that the primary responsibility of politicians [in the killings of Kuciak and Kusnirova] is in the fact that there existed a system in which oligarchs and mafiosi could control law enforcement agencies and the courts. That gave them a sense of being untouchable, which eventually led to the tragic events. That is a much more serious thing than just attitudes to journalists.  

But their attitudes are also important, and no, with the brief exception of a few weeks after the killings, they have not changed, and if so, perhaps for the worse. Among some leading politicians, there exists a mix of authentic paranoia and cynical delegitimisation through explicit attacks on journalists, which we now see even in parts of the West. 

IPS: Legislation passed this month in Slovakia will give politicians the chance to demand a ‘right to reply’ from newspapers which publish stories politicians say are untrue or misleading. Do you think this is an attempt to interfere in editorial independence in Slovak media?

LF: This was tried before [with the same legislation] and didn’t lead to any dramatic consequences. There are dangerous trends in Slovakia, but I would not see this piece of legislation as something we need to worry about too much.  

IPS: When President Zuzana Caputova took office earlier this year, did Slovakia’s journalism community think that press freedom in Slovakia might improve in any way, and if so, how and why?

LF: The role of president in Slovakia is largely symbolic. That is not to say that symbols are not important. I think President Caputova has brought good energy and represents the right values. And if democracy is ever threatened, she can play a vital role. But in terms of media legislation, the way in which politicians communicate with the press, or actual threats to journalists, her powers are limited. It is good to know that attacks against the free press will not go unnoticed, but the legislature and executive have a greater impact on the everyday functioning of the media. 

IPS: Slovakia is just one of a number of countries around the world where press freedom appears to be coming under increasing threat and concerns are being raised about media independence. How do you think media outlets around the world can maintain their independence?    

LF: We are trying our best to help others, at least in the region – last year we launched Dennik N in the Czech Republic, in cooperation with local investors and journalists. After less than a year, they have over 11,000 subscribers and we hope they can copy our success. Similarly, we are looking at other markets. This is the most we can do. But I have no universal answers, different markets have different problems. 

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The post Q&A: A New Model for Independent Journalism in Slovakia appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

International media watchdogs, such as Reporters Without Borders and the International Press Institute, as well as major institutions such as the European Commission, have raised concerns about press freedom in Slovakia as big businesses buy up local media houses and politicians attack journalists.

The post Q&A: A New Model for Independent Journalism in Slovakia appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) has been investing in projects to assist African countries adapt to climate change. Seven out of the 10 most vulnerable countries to climate change are located on the continent even though Africa contributes less than 4 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). However, Africa needs between 7-15 billion dollars every year to adapt to the impacts of climate change, according to the AfDB. Pictured here is a wind energy generation plant located in Loiyangalani in northwestern Kenya. The plant is set to be the biggest in Africa, generating 300 MW. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 27 2019 (IPS)

African Development Bank (AfDB) President Akinwumi Adesina unveiled millions of dollars of new pledges at the United Nations this week amid growing fears of climate change ravaging the continent and derailing anti-poverty targets.

At a gathering of world leaders in New York, Adesina disclosed commitments on tackling global warming, a massive solar energy project in the Sahel, and an insurance scheme that poor countries can access when the next cyclone strikes. 

“Africa has been shortchanged by climate change, but it should not be shortchanged by climate finance,” Adesina told reporters at a press conference at the start of the U.N. General Assembly. 

The AfDB would double its climate financing to emerging economies to 25 billion dollars from 2020-2025, half of which would help governments adapt to droughts, rising tides and other impacts of climate change, said Adesina.

The bank would also help raise 250 million dollars to fund co-payments for insurance premiums so that disaster-prone countries get cashback when extreme weather events wreak chaos on their economies, said Adesina.

“Poor countries didn’t cause climate change, they shouldn’t be holding the short end of the stick,” said Adesina.

Another 20 million dollars would fund the Sahel’s new ‘Desert to Power’ solar scheme, for generating 10,000 MW of clean electricity for some 250 million people, including 90 million rural folks who live far from a power grid, said Adesina.

“This will make the Sahel the Baobab of energy,” said Adesina, referencing the hardy African tree. 

Such funding is welcome, but may not be enough. Africa needs between 7-15 billion dollars every year to adapt to the impacts of climate change, said Adesina. 

More broadly, the continent needs between 130–170 billion dollars of investment in power plants, internet cables and other infrastructure each year, leaving a funding gap of some 68-108 billion dollars, according to AfDB data.

Benedict Okey Oramah, President of Afreximbank, a trade finance body, said African economies had to work harder to train workers and expand their markets to lure investors to the continent.

“Countries which are fragmented are small markets, they cannot be of interest to people who want to put money to grow in a massive way,” Oramah told a meeting of African leaders at the U.N. on Wednesday. 

“We have to build again the technical schools that we used to have, we have to build universities of science and technology so that we can have the right skills to take up the kinds of jobs that are beginning to emerge.”

Talks came amid concerns from teen Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, U.N. chief Antonio Guterres and many others that the world was not on track for slashing emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Guterres, secretary-general of the world body, warned that while countries were making progress towards the U.N.’s so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), more efforts were needed.

“Let us be clear — we are far from where we need to be. We are off track,” said Guterres. “Deadly conflicts, the climate crisis, gender-based violence, and persistent inequalities are undermining efforts to achieve the goals.”

The 17 SDGs were agreed by the U.N.’s 193 member states in 2015 in an effort to curb war, climate change, famine, land degradation, gender-based inequality, and other global ills by 2030.

Progress is being made in access to energy, to decent work, and in battling poverty and child mortality, but youth unemployment has plateaued and global hunger and gender inequality continue to rise, the U.N. says.

In an impassioned address to a U.N. climate summit on Monday, youth activist Thunberg raged at world leaders in a crowd that briefly included United States President Donald Trump and his entourage.

“You have stolen my dreams, my childhood, with your empty words,” said Thunberg, 16. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about are your fairy tales of money and eternal economic growth.”

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The post Investments to Cushion African Countries against Climate Shocks Not Enough appeared first on Inter Press Service.